If I were to tell you one place spawned the creation of color photography, chocolate milk, and soda, I don’t know how likely you would be to guess Ireland. But that’s the place.

Irish inventors have a nice list of things they’ve contributed to mankind. On top of the previously mentioned items, we can add the submarine, modern chemistry, Guiness, the armored tank, aircraft ejection seat, rubber soles, and the atomic bomb. Quite a contribution, but not unexpected from a country nicknamed “the land of saints and scholars”.

Take some time to read over the infographic and make sure to make good use of all the great things given to us by the emerald isle! [Via]

Ensuring a high level of reading literacy has become a priority of many governments around the world. However, what is often forgotten is that there is more than one type of illiteracy, and not all are addressed during formal education. Many of these can be just as debilitating as an inability to read, but go unnoticed because the wider community is unaware of their existence. A few, such as scientific and functional illiteracy, have even resulted in death for some unfortunate people. These are a global problem because adults generally express some degree of at least one. Work out how many you might have.

20

Agricultural Illiteracy

This is the ability to understand information regarding agriculture. For those who work as farmers, this is rarely a problem, but to a city-dweller, reading that “90% of farmland was lost due to drought” might not seem a serious problem due to an utter lack of understanding of how farming works. People who are agriculturally illiterate fail to understand how important agriculture is, how dependent we all are on it, and make statements like “lack of farmland never causes famines, it’s just farmers being unreasonable and complaining” or “if they can grow this food overseas, then we can grow it here just as easily.”